SOCIETY’S ROLE ABOUT MENSTRUATION

According to studies, one ou of every ten school-age girls in today’s sub-Sarahan Africa routinely skips school when she has her period or just drops out altogether once she hits puberty. This is due to lack of not only private facilities (and it can be traumatic enough to go change a tampon in eighth grade even with the most private bathroom in the world), but basic femcare, as well. Added up, these absences total something like 10 to 20 percent of missed school time, which puts the average African schoolgirl at a huge disadvantage for the rest of her life. As a result, in November 2007, Procter & Gamble brands Always and Tampax announced that they were teaming up with HERO, an initiative of the United Nations Association. Their five-year awareness-building program is called Protecting Futures, through which, along with improving education, nutrition, and health services, they plan to distribute free Always and Tampax products to a small network of schools. “There are lots of reasons kids miss school,” said the P&G director of the program. “Being a girl shouldn’t be one of them.”

Commercial femcare is not unlike clothing in that both share a strange relationship with the social and political movements of the day. Developments and innovations in both have not only reflected society but, like all good design, have arisen directly and organically from the needs, beliefs, and values of the times. As a result, even the lowly pad or the humblest tampon can claim to be a genuine, if unconventional, agent of change.

Here in today’s America, we tend to be downright blasé about the social, political, and career opportunities available to us as women. While there may still be a glass ceiling, we only notice it because we’re finally high enough to bump against it. Nobody bats an eye at the thought of a female tennis champion, prime minister, astrophysicist, hedge fund manager, baseball ump, or lead guitarist. Women are not only capable of bringing home the bacon and frying it up in a pan, we can also marry and divorce at will, stay single and/or childless without being burned as some kind of witch, take out mortgages, own property, control our own money, pursue a Ph.D., and vote. Along the way, we can buy tampons, too. Yet a mere hundred years ago, virtually none of this was even a remote possibility.

Since its inception, the struggle for women’s rights has been and continues to be like a pendulum swinging back and forth between progress and reaction to that progress. Funnily enough, the two most important women’s movements of American history also happened to coincide with the biggest gains in menstrual management. Hard-fought gains in women’s rights came about just as advances in femcare were promising and actually creating new and unheard-of opportunities.

Conveniently, the movement for women’s rights can be broken down into three waves. “First-wave feminism” took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States and United Kingdom. It concerned itself in part with some pretty radical and wild-eyed notions: that women could, for example, own property all by themselves, have sex without being married, exercise birth control, and not be literally owned, along with their children, by their husbands and fathers like so much furniture. Mostly, however, first-wave feminism was about female suffrage — the right to vote.

Back then, there was a lot more at stake to voting rights than just being allowed to wear goofy campaign buttons, pull a lever, and then watch election returns on CNN with a sinking stomach. The underlying argument—that women were actually entitled to basic rights as individuals outside of their standing with men—became a prickly, nay, downright cranky national debate. In fact (and you may want to sit down for this part), most believed that a woman’s menstrual cycle made her inherently unstable, irresponsible, and incapable of any kind of intellectual rigor, a virtual time bomb of tears, soggy emotionalism, and hysteria.

The New York Times, the esteemed Gray Lady herself, published this opinion in 1912: “No doctor can ever lose sight of the fact that the mind of a woman is always threatened with danger from the reverberations of her physiological emergencies (i.e., menstruation). It is with such thoughts that the doctor lets his eyes rest upon the militant suffragist. He cannot shut them to the fact that there is mixed up in the woman’s movement such mental disorder, and he cannot conceal from himself the physiological emergencies which lie behind.” And the year before: “The mind of woman is so essentially different from that of man. Are you prepared to introduce sentimentalism and hysteria into the most solemn task a freeman has to execute—a task which should be approached in the same spirit in which you would approach a church — a task calling for the best powers of a mature masculine mind?”

Early suffrage workers like Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, founders of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), didn’t have the luxury of fronting a movement from a comfy home office, armed with the Internet, an espresso machine, and some landlines. They instead held rallies, wrote pamphlets, organized parades, protested in front of the White House, chained themselves to fences, and went on hunger strikes ... and as a direct result, were summarily beaten, shackled, arrested, thrown in prison, and, once there, tortured apparently for the sheer heck of it. And has one ever wondered throughout all this how these women actually handled getting their periods on top of everything else? Come to think of it, what did any woman do, prior to the advent of commercial femcare, in order to manage her monthly blood?

The answer, such as it is, will make you blanch. Up until a hundred years ago, women had to sling together their own methods of dealing with their flow any ol’ way they could — with rags, towels, or with nothing at all. All of this seriously limited their mobility, meaning it was a pretty dire time for women’s freedom, both literally and figuratively. As for the suffrage workers, almost nothing has been recorded about how they dealt with their menstrual flow—as it was, a woman’s right to vote only barely merited serious mention in the press, so one can only imagine how such august publications as the Times felt about something as essentially ignominious as blood regularly seeping from female loins.

One thing that made the problem of femcare back then so incredibly challenging, a puzzler worthy of Einstein, was the lack of underwear. Ever wonder about the illustrious history of that microfiber thong of yours? Back in the nineteenth century, there were no panties, undies, bikinis, briefs, boy shorts, nary even a set of knickers. For centuries, undergarments weren’t about hygiene or propriety, but rather artificiality, adornment, and warmth: chemises, petticoats, rib-cracking corsets, bodices.

Perhaps one reason for all those petticoats and shifts was to protect one’s outer dress from blood and other stains . . . or perhaps we kid ourselves. After all, if one was industrious and had a little mad money, it was possible to scare up a cotton apron lined with rubber, which presumably kept blood from seeping into the seat of one’s dress. There were also bloomers with rubber panels at the bottom available; but all of these were relative rarities, and due to their cost, effectively out of range for most women. No, most had to resort to stuffing between their legs or up their vaginas those materials they could get for free: rags, pieces of sheepskin, leaves, moss, or nothing at all.

From Harry Finley, founder of the online Museum of Menstruation, comes this translation from Friedrich Eduard Bilz’s Das Neue Naturheilverfahren (The New Natural Healing), published in the late nineteenth century: “Many women ... place nothing in that region [to absorb menses] and so in addition to the outer sex organs, underwear, sheets and bed covers, the lower belly and thighs are stiffened with dried blood . . . and finally because of the widespread prejudice against frequent washing and changing of clothes during this time, some women, even those of the better classes, are often filthy to an almost unbelievable degree.” Gives one a whole new way of looking at Scarlett O’Hara and Marie Antoinette, doesn’t it?

Women could also depend on the good ol’ terra firma, the ground itself. Female factory workers would often work standing up, sans underwear and knee-deep in straw into which they freely bled. The workstation, much like a stall full of farm animals, would be mucked out when the conditions became unbearably filthy.

So it was like a shining knight on a sanitary white charger when manufactured menstrual products hit the marketplace, literally affording a “new freedom” to women. In 1896, Johnson & Johnson introduced the very first disposable pad, Lister’s Towels (named for Joseph Lister, a British surgeon who popularized the concept of sterile surgery). To be sure, it took a while for commercial menstrual products to catch on, given what they were and the limits of advertising in such a relatively genteel time. But 1920 finally saw the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which stated: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” And the same year, Kotex pads went on sale.

Commercial femcare products were soon proliferating, and related advertising was up and running, as well. Yet as is the case with any giddy new revolution, there was a certain measure of morning-after reality. Even with all the newfound freedom Kotex promised, early disposable pads were no walk in the park. They were bulky, uncomfortable, cumbersome, and had to be attached, with safety pins or clips, to elastic belts that one wore around the waist. The whole getup was unwieldy and annoying, with major slippage potential, not to mention many opportunities for sudden, unexpected leaking. In the 1930s, commercial tampons were introduced, and they, too, were beset by problems, being clunky, awkward to insert, and not even especially absorbent. Still, these early prototypes at least beat bleeding into one’s crummy petticoat, and early-twentieth-century women must have surely basked in the heady glow of this fledgling political and menstrual freedom.

But at the same time, society was sneakily working on its own covert agenda. Guess what was introduced the year after women won the right to vote and Kotex hit the stores? The Miss America beauty pageant. Coincidence? From the very start, as if in direct if unconscious response to all those sweaty, noisy, totally undainty suffrage workers, the pageant championed an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. Racy, bobbed haircuts were forbidden, as was any makeup. In fact, anything modern was verboten in the fledgling pageant world, until at last the prototype of Miss America emerged as the squeaky clean, idealized representation of womanhood she is today... still conveying the message that despite any achievements or education, the ideal woman is still, above all, demure and decorative. And while Miss America’s unflagging popularity held steady for years (its annual televised extravaganza was consistently top-rated from its first airing in 1951 through much of the 1960s), conflict was bubbling elsewhere under society’s seemingly placid surface.

In 1963, The Feminine Mystique landed in bookstores, and overnight, Betty Friedan tore a new hole in the illusion that women were fulfilled being merely wives, mothers, and homemakers. In the first chapter, “The Problem That Has No Name,” she wrote: “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. ... As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”

While there were certainly many women who felt Friedan got it all wrong, still others who felt trapped by domesticity found in her message both a kindred spirit and a rallying cry. Thus, the so-called second wave of feminism was launched. With the vote long since sewn up, the women’s liberation movement protested fundamental inequalities and championed everything from parity in wages and the Equal Rights Amendment to fair access to education and abortion rights. Birth control pills became available in the early 1960s, women’s health collectives sprang up as an alternative to the male-dominated medical establishment, and the first edition of that estimable alternative women’s health bible, Our Bodies, Ourselves, came out in 1973. Midwives came back into fashion and the number of natural childbirths rocketed.

Title IX was passed in 1972, which meant schools could no longer discriminate when it came to funding and providing sports and activities for girls. Women’s rights took another significant leap forward in 1973 when the Supreme Court heard Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion in all fifty states, ruling that privacy regarding one’s reproductive system was consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. And while all this was going on, self-adhesive sanitary napkins hit the market.

Not a big deal, you say? Oh, ho-ho ... but we beg to differ.

Overnight, restrictive menstrual gear, practically the same kind one’s grandmother had to use — goofy sanitary belts, safety pins and clips, special panties, oversize pads — became singularly obsolete, a thing of the past. With names like New Freedom, Carefree, and Stayfree, it was clear that change was in the air, baby!

Since pads no longer needed to be superlong to be anchored to those clips fore and aft, they were given permission to shrink. What’s more, superabsorbent materials were developed, allowing pad makers to make their product even slimmer and lighter—and far less detectable—than before. New products, like minipads, were invented and became all the rage.

But as women fought discrimination in the workplace and society, there simultaneously developed an unmistakable feminist trend toward negating the feminine, as well. This is when the women’s movement took on all those unsavory “man-hating” connotations that unfortunately linger to this day.

To be fair, there probably was a lot going on along those lines back then. Come to think of it, who could blame women for militantly refusing to come in second anymore, no matter what the price? Yet anything that smacked even faintly of the feminine or girly was soon seen as suspect, even downright counterrevolutionary. Lipstick, anything pink, and being a housewife were viewed with an equally hairy eyeball, whereas navy business suits, big shoulder pads, and not shaving or wearing makeup were suddenly de rigeur. Overnight, Everywoman became Superwoman, implying there was something deeply wrong with you if you couldn’t have it all and do it all. The party line evolved that women were not just equal to but the same as or even better than men: a position that came close to negating biology and natural differences.

Similarly, anything that had to do with menstruation was often disparaged, in some cases even eliminated. In 1971, a feminist reproductive health self-help group came up with a do-it-yourself “period extraction kit,” by which one’s entire period could be hoovered out in mere minutes. Women were urged to get together with a few friends, hop up on the dining room table, and practice extracting each other’s periods. The inventors toured the country, demonstrating the technique at women-only seminars. As eyebrow-raising as it may seem now, it was surprisingly, if briefly, le dernier cri as a fad, not unlike goldfish swallowing or piling into a telephone booth.

And where are we today?

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PATENTED MENSTRUAL PRODUCTS THAT DIDN’T SET THE WORLD ON FIRE

A tampon that would let the wearer know when it was almost filled to capacity (patent #7,214,848—2001)

An intravaginal balloon that would prevent any leaking (patent #6,747,184—2004)

A tampon with an adhesive string that would prevent it from being seen when wearing a bathing suit (patent #6,679,868—2001)

A vulvar deodorant system (patent #3,948,257—1976)

A sanitary napkin with a rear strip that would reside in the user’s intergluteal crevice, aka one’s butt crack (patent #6,613,031—2003)

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Well, from the early 1990s onward, we’ve been told that we’re hip-deep in feminism’s third wave. So what exactly are today’s feminists fighting for? After all, women already have the right to vote, and in many areas, discrimination and inequality have been, if not eliminated, then at least reduced. Reproductive rights have become a different battlefield with the advent of RU-486, and to make things even more complicated, there’s no longer anything approaching consensus on the ethical nuances of abortion and choice.

What’s more, there’s been a generational reaction against feminism’s second wave, which was in fact created by and geared toward middle-class, white, college-educated women. The second wave didn’t pretend to represent minorities, or touch on vital global, class, or sexuality issues. The third-wave feminist issues seem to be more about individual empowerment and personal decisions about everything from consumer choices to sexual expression than they are about any single, overriding ideology of what it means to be female. Perhaps appropriately, commercial femcare also appears to be riding something of a third wave, as well.

Thanks to menstrual suppression drugs, we can now choose how often we menstruate, if at all. Yet this raises numerous questions, from health risks to problems with potential fertility. And we wonder: Is this one giant leap forward for womankind—freedom from hormonal shifts, bleeding, the risk of unplanned pregnancy? Or a step backward—that by ridding ourselves of an intrinsic part of being female, we’re just trying to make ourselves more like men? Are all periods a problem and is ending them genuine empowerment? Or is this just another shrewd, short-sighted corporate ploy based on making us hate our own bodies?

We’re raising a generation of girls for whom girl power is taken for granted, and so maybe it’s no surprise that this is where we are. In essence, we’re handing young women the opportunity to change the way their bodies work, erasing something that’s been a fundamental female experience since the first humans stood up from all that primordial goo. While we believe women should be free to do what they want with their bodies, we’re nevertheless disturbed by the underlying message being sold to us wholesale, no questions asked... and all for a lousy buck.

Sure, it’s progress. We’re just wondering if it’s in the right direction.

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MENSTRUATION IN THE MOVIES

Carrie, directed in 1976 by Brian De Palma and based on the Stephen King novel, is a suburban horror movie about menstruation, the taboos surrounding it, and the power it can unleash. High school loser Carrie White is the butt of the school’s derision when she gets her first period in gym class; but woe to all those who mock her at the prom! To some, it’s a cheesy camp-fest; to us, it’s one of the best horror films ever made, a true fairy tale for grown-ups and an extraordinary meditation on the awesome power of budding female sexuality.

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By Elissa Stein and Susan Kim in "Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation",St.Martin's Griffin, New York, 2010, chapter 7. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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